Alex Hardy: Existing MGA partnerships driving portfolio growth

While there are plenty of opportunities for insurer partnerships with new and burgeoning MGAs, a careful approach to new business combined with a real focus on developing existing relationships is the key to sustainable portfolio growth.

This is according to Alex Hardy, director of delegated and distribution at SiriusPoint, who sat down with Insurance Times at the 2026 Managing General Agents’ Association’s (MGAA) annual conference to discuss the role MGAs play in his firm’s portfolio development.

“We’re at an interesting inflection point in our journey. We’ve been growing our UK and European delegated portfolio over the last three years to help our group diversify and be better represented in those territories,” Hardy explains.

“We’ve had quite a rock-and-roll journey with lots of onboarding of partners two and a half years or so ago. Being totally committed to long-term partnerships, we put everything onto three-year contracts and we’re reaching the point where they’re all due for renewals – I’m pleased to say that all of our strategic partners that we want to continue with have decided to continue with us.

“We continue to look for new partnerships that are going to help us diversify and grow our portfolio. We’ve still got growth ambitions, but when you’re setting out in the early days, you’re really doing one thing – now we’ve got the exciting challenge of trying to pat our head and rub our tummy at the same time.”

Hardy adds that success in portfolio expansion is predicated on balancing the search for new partnerships with the management of existing ones, highlighting that 90% of the growth in SiriusPoint’s distribution strategy is occurring via existing partners.

“Pleasingly, we’re finding that if we’re doing one line of business with a partner, they want to do a second, or they might want to expand into a different territory,” he says.

Filling the gaps

According to Hardy, the opportunities for portfolio expansion are numerous and SiriusPoint has been trying to carefully broaden its presence over the last few years.

He continues: “We’ve had great success over the past years either establishing from scratch or re-establishing new teams where we’ve got gaps in our proposition.

“So, we setup our marine team three years ago. We didn’t have any marine in the specialty part of our business, which we felt was a miss. Now, our marine business is circa £100m and we’ve built that from scratch in the last three years.

“We’ve done something similar in energy, so in some of the specialty lines we still see the opportunity for growth and we’re just launching a new crisis solutions team.”

His firm, however, has no fixed targets for expansion. Setting arbitrary target figures for growth would risk incentivising short-cutting around due diligence procedures and risk “letting existing partners down” by fixating on new business.

Over the next few years, with changes to the market cycle apparent, Hardy reiterates that careful decision making is the key to sustainable growth.

“There’s no doubt that the market is softening in areas. We are being very, very mindful that the decisions we make today have be cited with proof, because we’re making long-term commitments,” he says.

“We agonise over making sure we’ve got the right alignment and the right structure of deals with partners who are prepared to walk away from business if they need to, for the sake of portfolio integrity.”